The White Guard

Wednesday 24 March 2010 17.30 EDT
First published on Wednesday 24 March 2010 17.30 EDT

Howard Davies is our best director of Russian drama. After last year's Burnt By the Sun, he now brings us a breathtaking production of Mikhail Bulgakov's 1926 stage version of his novel about a group of doomed Tsarist sympathisers living in Ukraine during a violent national upheaval. Never before have I seen the chaos of civil war so vividly caught on a British stage.

Bulgakov's focus is on the Turbin family and their friends trapped in Kiev in 1918, and witnessing their world fall apart. The Germans, who have appointed their own puppet ruler, are fleeing to Berlin. A bloodthirsty Ukrainian nationalist army is advancing on Kiev. And behind them come the Bolsheviks. It's a disintegrating society in which the Turbins cling to their ideals of honour, hospitality and familial loyalty. But the pivotal figure is Elena who, in the course of the play, sees her husband defect with the Germans, loses her White Guard army brothers to the war, and turns for support to a cowardly local casanova. As Elena and the Turbins' family listen to the ominous Red Army drumbeats, they know that their world is for ever lost.

The temptation might be to bathe the play in a warm glow of nostalgic sentimentality. But both Davies's production and Andrew Upton's new version brilliantly highlight the absurdity beneath the heroism. When Daniel Flynn, as Elena's elder brother Alexei, announces that the future holds only hatred "born of loneliness and frustration", he denies any possibility of historical progress. And, even though Alexei dies a valiant death, there is something farcical about the gun-toting anarchy that greets his attempt to disband his regiment. Bulgakov himself also shrewdly sees that even sinking ships have their survivors. The prime example is Elena's lover, beautifully played by Conleth Hill as the archetypal chameleon: realising the Bolsheviks will triumph, he swans off to Moscow to get a job in the opera and returns in a long coat he describes as "essence of prole".

Mixing the comic with the elegiac, the production shows what it might have been like if the Bloomsbury group had unwittingly been caught up in the Bosnian civil war. In a large ensemble, it also contains striking solo performances. Justine Mitchell's Elena luxuriates in her own seductiveness, Pip Carter is touching and funny as a clumsily gauche cousin who falls under her spell, and Paul Higgins is suitably manic as a vodka-swilling captain. But much of the triumph lies with Bunny Christie's design, Neil Austin's lighting and Christopher Shutt's sound, which transport us from the Turbins' spacious quarters to the turbulent battlefront with a deftness that shows even chaos can be theatrically ensnared.